IT 2008: The History of a New Computing Discipline
The IT model curriculum represents an excellent starting point toward understanding more about IT as an academic discipline.
Research and Advances
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A Global Collaboration to Deploy Help to China
A firsthand account of an international team effort to install the Sahana disaster-management system in Chengdu, Sichuan after an earthquake.
Only if the programmer can prove (through formal machine-checkable proofs) it is free of bugs with respect to a claim of dependability.
Business Impact of Web 2.0 Technologies
What do wikis, blogs, podcasts, social networks, virtual worlds, and the rest do for corporate productivity and management?
CoSaMP: Iterative Signal Recovery From Incomplete and Inaccurate Samples
Compressive sampling (CoSa) is a new paradigm for developing data sampling technologies. The main computational challenge in CoSa is to reconstruct a compressible signal from the reduced representation acquired by the sampling device.
Technical Perspective: QIP = PSPACE Breakthrough
It is now clear that for a wide range of problems, quantum computers offer little or no advantage over their classical counterparts.
Understanding Throughput-Oriented Architectures
For workloads with abundant parallelism, GPUs deliver higher peak computational throughput than latency-oriented CPUs.
Regulating the Information Gatekeepers
Concerns about biased manipulation of search results may require intervention involving government regulation.
Supporting Ubiquitous Location Information in Interworking 3G and Wireless Networks
Positioning mobile devices in the third generation of wireless communication networks is crucial to many commercial services. However, positioning techniques vary by accuracy, implementation cost, and typical application scenarios.
Relative Status of Journal and Conference Publications in Computer Science
Though computer scientists agree that conference publications enjoy greater status in computer science than in other disciplines, there is little quantitative evidence to support this view.
Technical Perspective: Data Races Are Evil with No Exceptions
Exploiting parallelism has become the primary means to higher performance. Shared memory is a pervasively used programming model. Unfortunately, shared-memory programs are notoriously prone to subtle bugs, often due to data races.
FastTrack: Efficient and Precise Dynamic Race Detection
Multithreaded programs are notoriously prone to race conditions. Prior work developed precise dynamic race detectors that never report false alarms. However, these checkers employ expensive data structures that result in significant performance overhead.
Goldilocks: A Race-Aware Java Runtime
GOLDILOCKS is a Java runtime that monitors program executions and throws a DataRaceException when a data race is about to occur. This prevents racy accesses from taking place, and allows race conditions to be handled before they cause errors.
Using Complexity to Protect Elections
Computational complexity may truly be the shield against election manipulation.
How Offshoring Affects IT Workers
IT jobs requiring interpersonal interaction or physical presence in fixed locations are less likely to be sent out of the country.
A Neuromorphic Approach to Computer Vision
Neuroscience is beginning to inspire a new generation of seeing machines.
Originally invented for music/data sharing and volunteer computing, P2P systems have become an efficient means for delivering content and innovative services.
Technical Perspective: Belief Propagation
Nearly every modern tracking system is based on the seminal work of Rudolf Kalman who developed the optimal fusion algorithm for linear dynamics under Gaussian noise.
Difference Engine: Harnessing Memory Redundancy in Virtual Machines
Virtual machine monitors are a popular platform for Internet hosting centers and cloud-based compute services. But main memory is not amenable to multiplexed hardware resources and is often a bottleneck in achieving higher degrees of consolidation.
Technical Perspective: A VM ‘Engine’ That Makes a Difference
The past decade has witnessed a renaissance in server virtualization. Diwaker Gupta et al. present a novel approach for significantly improving the efficiency of virtualized servers.
Nonparametric Belief Propagation
Probabilistic graphical models and algorithms for approximate inference have proven to be powerful tools in a wide range of applications in statistics and AI. However, applying these methods to models with continuous variables remains a challenging task.
The same component isolation that made it effective for large distributed telecom systems makes it effective for multicore CPUs and networked applications.
Confronting the Myth of Rapid Obsolescence in Computing Research
Computing research ages more slowly than research in other scientific disciplines, supporting the call for parity in funding.
Performance Evaluation and Model Checking Join Forces
A call for the perfect marriage between classical performance evaluation and state-of-the-art verification techniques.
Shape the Future of Computing
ACM encourages its members to take a direct hand in shaping the future of the association. There are more ways than ever to get involved.
Get InvolvedCommunications of the ACM (CACM) is now a fully Open Access publication.
By opening CACM to the world, we hope to increase engagement among the broader computer science community and encourage non-members to discover the rich resources ACM has to offer.
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